Tegra 4i phones won't arrive until next year

Nvidia blames carrier certification

The firstTegra 4 tablets should start hitting retail over the next few weeks, but Tegra 4i phones won’t show up this year.

Nvidia insists the chip will be ready by late 2013, but the actual devices won’t arrive until early 2014. According to Nvidia, carrier certification will take a few months to sort out, and although the devices should be submitted in Q4 or even late Q3, they won’t get the green light this year.

Although ARM introduced the new A12 mid-range core a few days ago, Nvidia believes there's still some life left in A9 cores. It claims tweaked A9 cores used in the T4i, clocked between 1.9GHz and 2.3GHz, should be able to deliver about 80 percent of the performance of A15 cores, Heise.de reports.

In addition to faster CPU cores, the Tegra 4i features integrated LTE and 60 GPU cores, which means it should wipe the floor with Tegra 3 chips, which only have 12 GPU cores.

However, by the time it actually hits the market, it will have to compete with beefier chips from Qualcomm and Samsung.

As for Tegra 5, the first devices are expected in the second half of the year, although Nvidia will probably announce the chip a few months earlier.